When a child chokes on something small and the coughing stops, most families assume the danger has passed. A case report published Aug. 3 in Case Reports in Pulmonology shows how long that assumption can hold. Respiratory specialists at the University of British Columbia and BC Cancer in Vancouver used a flexible bronchoscope to pull a tiny plastic cup from a Barbie dining set out of the airway of a 59-year-old woman. She had inhaled it at age 8.
The authors call it the longest documented case of a retained airway foreign body reported to date. For comparison, a 2017 report in The Clinical Respiratory Journal described removing a pen cap that a 58-year-old man had inhaled 41 years earlier.
